The Great British Sewing Bee - Week 1

My housemate over at Stuck in a Book regularly reviews the Great British Bake-Off as a floury hiatus from his usual book reviews. I've been inspired - without aspiring to gain the following he does, here's my first attempt at reviewing a show that gets me even more excited.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the Great British Sewing Bee.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, the premise is as follows: 10 amateur sewers complete dressmaking challenges against the clock. The person who does the least well leaves the show; at the end of the series, the final person remaining is crowned Britain's Best Home Sewer.


Before we go any further at all, we need to clear something up once and for all: this show features amateurs dressmakers, not amateur plumbers. The BBC have confusingly decided to label the contestants sewers, as in people-who-sew; as opposed to the sort of sewers which carry away the dirty water from our toilets and baths and washing machines. The designation sounds all right on screen but it doesn't read very well, so I'll try and avoid it. Just keep in mind that in this series, the default reading of 'sewer' is 'one who sews'.

And in 5th place, this murky tunnel featuring brickwork and BO

Enter, episode 1. The theme for the week is 'Basic Construction Techniques'. Claudia Winkleman is back, doing a pretty good job of imitating the unimitable banter of Mel and Sue on the Bake Off, with the marked disadvantage of having only herself to banter with. Returning judge Patrick Grant of Saville Row is joined by Esme Young, who lectures at the fashion school Central Saint Martin's. The contestants, if they were cheeses, would be labelled as a 'selection': the stay-at-home dad, the teenage novice, the footballer, the granny who's been sewing for 60 years.

Jade, the teenager, likes making clothes for her little sister.
 

 

And for her dogs.

Challenge 1: Follow a pattern

 It all kicks off with a 2 1/2 hour challenge to follow a pattern for a top, cut on the bias in stripey fabric to create a chevron, or glorified zigzag, like this:

It's really hard to match the stripes when you cut on the bias because the fabric easily pulls out of shape (at least that's what everyone is saying, I haven't actually tried it myself).

The contestants each pick a fabric from the haberdashery, which hosts an incredible selection of fabrics, ribbons, buttons, and all things sewingy. If I was on the show, the habershery would make me squee. Contestant Charlotte is on the same wavelength.

'I want it in my house. We don't need bedrooms or anything'

The drama kicks in right away: footballer Josh can't figure out which way up to put the pattern; Ghislaine (whose trademark is sewing in her underwear) makes the mistake of picking a fabric where the stripes aren't straight, and starts over after an hour; cheeky Angeline picks a fabric where the stripe is half-hidden by an overlay of flowers, making it particularly hard to determine whether she's successfully lined up her stripes or not.

The contestants are a friendly bunch: they've only just met, but already they're helping each other out.

Charlotte helps Josh

Joyce helps Duncan

Duncan helps Joyce

There is some raw emotion.

Apparently he's happy.

 

Tracy finishes well in advance and sits back to enjoy a cup of tea.

And watch everyone else struggle on.

When it's all over, everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Except Rumana who didn't quite finish and is trying to hide behind her dressmaker's dummy.

Stay-at-home dad Jamie scoops the prize, because he matched his lines successfully despite using the trickiest fabric.

Challenge 2: Alteration

The second challenge is an alteration challenge. Contestants are given a garment and the mandate is simple: turn it into something else. This week, the challenge is to transform a maternity dress, which looks like this:

At this point, my policy is to press the pause button and figure out what I would do myself. I love alterations - probably about half of the sewing projects I have planned are remakes of something I already own.

For me, there's one basic principle to alteration: it's about changing the garment you have already, not about making something completely new. There's so much fabric in this dress that it would be easy to just use it as fabric to cut pattern pieces from. In my book, that's recycling, not alteration.

Maternity dresses are designed to be loose-hanging, so my first thought was to gather in the waist to give it a little bit more shape. This dress is plain and a lovely shade of blue, the perfect backdrop for a bit of extra colour. I'd pick out another cloth in a bold pattern, possibly a little tribal, with some blue in it, to add to the length. Just sewing an extra strip along the bottom doesn't sound attractive, so my idea was to cut slits upwards from the hem and insert triangular pieces of the patterned fabric, adding to the length as well.

Given the time, I would also want to cut off the sleeves and gather the shoulders in with a little loop of fabric to hold them in place. I never would have the time, but as I'm not actually doing the challenge at all - I can dream, right?

I've drawn a picture to give you an idea. The patterned fabric should look a bit stiffer and fuller, but I don't know how to draw that.

This is not an artist's impression (because I am not an artist)

Ninety minutes later, 10 alterations have been lined up for judging. There's a theme in this week's submissions: the skirt.

Esme's reaction: 'I'm really disappointed.'

There are, however, a couple of pieces that stand out. My favourite is Joyce's, perhaps because she used the same triangle-inserts that I wanted (it turns out they're called godets). Hers are in a gold sparkly fabric which has also been used to finish the armholes and for a yoke at the back.

I can't quite decide whether I would wear it.

Rumana is trying to hide behind her dummy again.

You can come out now - the judges really like it!

First place, again, goes to Jamie, who apparently used a good variety of techniques. I wonder if the judges picked this purely to encourage everyone else to be more imaginative.

It's very impressive of course; it just doesn't look very nice.

Final challenge: prepared fit

For the final challenge, the contestants have had the chance to choose and prepare a pattern in advance, in this case a skirt. This time, however, they're fitting to live models instead of to a dress-form, and the judges are on the lookout for the perfect fit.

'This is the second skirt I've made in my entire life' says Josh. (The first, presumably, is the one he made in the previous challenge.) As if that wasn't bad enough, he's lost a pattern piece:

The fun thing about fitting to a model is that it can look awkward if you hit pause at the wrong moment:

I don't think it's under there, Josh

Fortunately for Josh, the skirt still comes out beautifully.

Rumana takes it upon herself to teach the audience about shapes.

Rectangle

Triangle

One reason I love this show is that there's a lot to learn about sewing techniques. Here's Tracy's method for making pleats:

Push a strip of fabric into the folds of a paper concertina...

...and press.

 

Tada!

That's one to keep up my sleeve.

Or on the edge of my pockets.

At the end, there is enough swirling of skirts to please even me:

Esme makes a model blush with her frank comments on Angeline's creation: 'I think it fits really well under her arse.'

To be fair, it really does.

This time, Jamie's choice to use a difficult fabric doesn't pay off, as his rolled hem is declared 'quite bumpy'.

At the end of the show, the judges announce their favourite item, dubbed Garment of the Week. Angeline's bum-enhancing skirt is this week's top pick, as Esme demonstrates a belief in judgment by alliteration:

'The reasons for this are: Fit, finish, ...and fabric.'

Sadly, not everyone can stay in the show. This week it's maths tutor Duncan who is asked to leave. Like every good story, the episode ends on a note of moral caution: many sins can be forgiven, but you just can't get away with an uneven hem.

A sad and lonely Duncan leaves the sewing room

However, I think it's Rumana who has best summed up the spirit of this week's challenges.

'I know they call it basic construction week, but I'm pretty sure that's quite advanced.'